SR Spring 09.Indb

Alena Ledeneva From Russia with Blat: Can Informal Networks Help Modernize Russia? since the collapse of the soviet union, moscow has become a global city with a vibrant urban and cultural life—one of the most expensive capitals in the world with famous clubs and restaurants as well as one of the most popular destinations for city workers and diplo- mats. Has corruption been instrumental in Moscow’s development? The answer is complicated and in many ways a matter of definition. It depends on whether one considers informal practices—inherited from Soviet times as well as the new era—as corrupt and how one concep- tualizes corruption. I will illustrate some of these complications for the case of the Soviet practice of blat, explain its “monetization” and evolving relationship with corruption in the post-Soviet transition, and analyze the role of informal networks in present-day Russia. Blat is best defined as the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures. Blat networks channeled an alternative currency—an informal exchange of favors—that introduced elements of the market This article is based on the text of my inaugural lecture that took place at the Gustav Tuck Lecture Theatre, University College London on November 27, 2008. I am grateful to the British Academy for the financial support of the national surveys conducted in Russia on my behalf by the Levada Centre and quoted in this paper. Special thanks go to my students and to my family and friends for their help, comments and suggestions. social research Vol 76 : No 1 : Spring 2009 257 into the planned economy and loosened up the rigid constraints of the political regime. Blat merged with patterns of sociability to such an extent that people were unable to distinguish between friendship and the use of friendship. The boundaries became particularly blurred as the exchanged favors were favors of a particular kind—“favors of access.” Both in literature and in conversations, blat is often referred to as corrupt practice. This may be right in certain contexts but it is also misleading, for neither blat nor corruption has a clear or single meaning, nor are these terms independent of moral judgements. Corruption is commonly defined as the use of public office for private advantage (the latter term being understood not only in a pecuniary sense but also in terms of status and influence). However, as Friedrich (1966: 74-5), following Weber, has pointed out, the use of private office for private advantage is not always perceived as corrupt.1 When Weber set out an “ideal type” of bureaucracy, he associated it with a hierarchical division of labor, directed by explicit rules that are impersonally applied; staffed by full-time, lifetime professionals who do not in any sense own the “means of administration” or their jobs or the sources of their funds, and live off a salary rather than from income derived directly from the perfor- mance of their job. These are all features found in the public service, in the offices of private firms, in universities, and so on. Weber contrasted the bureaucracy to “prebends” or “benefices,” meaning an “office” with some income-yielding property—for example, a farm or tax-gathering rights from which the officeholder lives (1968). The notion of corruption made little sense in patrimonial systems where jobs were given away in order to “feed” their holders. The prebend officially “owns” his job and expects tribute for performing it, as opposed to a modern bureaucrat, who is paid a salary for following the official rules reliably and is not allowed to charge fees for himself or to accept gifts (as this constitutes the “misuse of public office for private gain”). Corruption is therefore a modern concept, associated with the transformation of what Weber described as patrimonial power struc- tures, where decisions are taken not on the basis of institutionalized rules but on the basis of personal relationships and traditional 258 social research forms of authority. Transformations of this kind led to rational-legal and legal systems, where rules are institutionalized to such an extent that corruption can be conceptualized as the deviation from them. A dehistoricized notion of corruption, however, is unusable in societies with patrimonial legacies. Not all postcommunist countries meet the modernity standard set by Weber. The lack of a clear division between public and private in postcommunist countries generates forms of expediency and rationality that are not conducive to modernity and present an obstacle to the rationality of the “rule of law.” Even in modern contexts, the clash between an abstract definition of corruption and its application to a complex real world has resulted in distinc- tions between so-called “good,” “bad” and “ambiguous”—or white, black and grey—corruption (Heidenheimer, 1970: 26-7). According to Lampert (1984: 371), cases of corruption have a ranking specific to the society. The Soviets clearly felt that bribery was a worse form of corruption than a small-scale use of public resources for private ends (such as using workers to do private jobs in enterprise time). Cultural connotations of money as “dirty” made nonmonetary transactions fairly legitimate (Humphrey, 2000). This was in tune with the distinc- tion drawn between various forms of offense in the criminal code and the different penalties for engaging in them (Heinzen, 2007). Blat was not on the criminal scale at all and could not strictly speaking be char- acterized as illegal (by reason of its small scale or recognized necessity [voiti v polozhenie]), thus falling in the category of “good” or “ambiguous” corruption (see also Krastev, 2004). The oppressive nature of the communist regime, and its privilege-based way of distributing goods, introduces another twist in interpretation of the nature of blat practices: if blat corrupted the corrupt regime, can we refer to it as corruption? With these considerations in mind, to equate blat and corruption in Soviet conditions is to misunderstand the nature of Soviet socialism. Historicizing blat helps identifying its important place in the functioning of socialism vis-à-vis patrimonialism and modernity. Contextualizing blat helps establishing that it commonly aimed at obtaining food, goods, and services that people were entitled to have. In the folklore definition of the From Russia with Blat 259 six paradoxes of socialism, every paradox can be explained by informal practice, widespread but hidden from outsiders (as in square brackets): No unemployment but nobody works. [Absenteeism] Nobody works but productivity increases. [False reporting] Productivity increases but shops are empty. [Shortages] Shops are empty but fridges are full. [Blat] Fridges are full but nobody is satisfied. [Unfair privileges] Nobody is satisfied but all vote unanimously. [Cynicism]2 These practices were the open secrets of socialism, commonly known but officially unacknowledged and rarely registered in written sources inside the country. It is only since the Soviet Union has collapsed that people have been able to reflect on such practices (just as in the 1950s, those who left the Soviet Union were able to describe their blat experience in the Harvard Interviewing Project (Fitzpatrick, 2000a; 2000b). Blat developed together with the regime and reflected its changes: at first there were the basic necessities such as food, jobs, and living space, helping kulaks to escape exile or making it possible for Bolsheviks to christen their babies despite the party ban on religious rituals. Then came the more sophisticated needs of late socialism associated with education, mobility and consumerism. But although there may seem to be a parallel between the way contacts were used in Bolshevik Russia (for example, in order to conceal class origins given the constraints of the Bolshevik demand for a proletarian background), and in postcommunist Russia (where contacts could allow one to be “appointed” a millionaire), this is misleading. The nature of the regime and its constraints on human behavior does matter in assessing the role of informal practices. Informal practices are intrinsically ambivalent in their func- tions: they both serve the regime and the people, while simultaneously undermining the regime and corrupting the people. In authoritarian regimes, the outcome of such ambivalence is “corruption with a human face”—the underside that lubricated the rigidity of political and economic constraints. As people used to say, the “severity of our laws is compensated for by their nonobservance.” 260 social research The power of informal networks was such that blat—the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures—can be effectively conceptualized as the know-how of the Soviet system and the reverse side of the over-controlling center. On the one hand, the Soviet regime was pene- trated by widely spread informal practices, depended on it, and allowed them to compensate for its own rigidity. On the other hand informal practices served individual needs and facilitated some personal free- dom and choice. The power of networks to tackle the economic, political, ideological, and social pressures of the socialist system effectively meant that the system worked against its own proclaimed principles. Yet paradoxically, by subverting the socialist system, the power of networks also supported it. Thus research into blat has helped solve a double puzzle in the history of authoritarian regimes: how people survived in an economy of shortage, and how the regime survived under similar constraint. But it also opened an avenue to explore the nature of political and economic regimes from a new perspective—the perspective of informal practices. Informal practices have become an important indicator in assessing models of governance. In How Russia Really Works I have identified the informal practices that have replaced blat in the functioning of the political and economic institutions of the 1990s (Ledeneva, 2006).

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